Research Active The Newsletter of University of Kent Research Services, Vol 13, February 2018
Fit for the Future Following the announcement in 2016 of an extra £4.7bn “to enhance the UK’s position as a world leader in science and innovation”, the long-awaited funding instruction manual — “Building a Britain Fit for the Future” (aka The Industrial Strategy) landed on the 27th November 2017. (Although you would be forgiven for having missed it arriving as it did on the day that the majority of the world’s attention was upon the announcement of Prince Harry’s engagement to Meghan Markle.) Branded as a “modern” strategy, the plan is to boost the economy by focusing upon the country’s strengths and by embracing opportunities for technical change. The 70’s style approach of “backing winners” is out in favour of a more inclusive range of initiatives aimed at getting “all parts of the country firing on all cylinders”. Raising the Bar The crux of the Strategy is in addressing the UK’s persistent productivity gap with its competitors. UK productivity – output per hour worked — is currently 20% below pre-financial crisis levels, relegating the UK to the lower leagues of international competitiveness. In the time that a UK worker makes £1, for example, a German makes £1.35. These national averages also mask huge differences regional-
ly—with productivity in central London almost double that of many other areas. The Strategy is built around five “foundations of productivity”, each of which is supported by a range of policies and funding schemes—some new, some recycled.
Business Secretary Greg Clark launches the Strategy in November 2017
The Key Policies Include : Ideas : creating the worlds most innovative economy Raising total R&D investment to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 Investing £725m in new Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund People : good jobs and greater earning power for all An extra £406m into maths, digital and technical education Creating a National Retraining Scheme starting with a £64m investment in digital and construction skills Infrastructure : highest performing physical and virtual networks Increasing the National Productivity Investment Fund to £31bn for improvements in transport, housing and digital infrastructure £400m investment in the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles Business Environment : promoting best practice and facilitating scale-up Launch and roll out of Sector Deals - partnerships between Government and specific industries (see below) Investing in innovative, high potential businesses through a new £2.5bn Investment Fund Places : creating prosperous communities across the UK £1.7bn for a Transforming Cities Fund to increase intra-city transport £42m for a Teacher Development Premium pilot exercise in disadvantaged areas Continued on Page 2
This edition of ResearchActive has been edited by Sarah Tetley. Contact her for more information or clarification on any of the 1 items in this edition. For the latest from the world of research funding, go to fundermental.blogspot.com or Twitter @frootle
Grand Challenges In addition to the focus on the five foundations of productivity, the Strategy identifies four global trends, or “Grand Challenges” : Artificial intelligence and data; The future of mobility; Clean growth; and, The ageing society. These Challenges are presented “as an open invitation to business, academia and civil society to work and engage with the government to innovate, develop new technologies and ensure the UK seizes these global opportunities”. The Strategy is not prescriptive on how these challenges should be met. For Kent, this lack of specificity provides the flexibility for us to shape a unique approach that builds on the strengths of both the University and of our industrial partners within the region. But to benefit from the Strategy we will need to act quickly. The timeframes are short and we need to identify how the funding is related to excellence within the University. The need for an active approach is made even more urgent when one recognises that, unlike many other regions, Kent has no single dominant industry sector and lacks a strong regional identity, unlike the Midlands and the North of England, for example. Playing to our Strengths That being said, Kent is in a strong position to seize upon the academic challenges presented by the Strategy, possessing research and innovation expertise in all four Grand Challenges, as well as strengths in “the digital” – a thread that runs throughout the
Strategy and is the key to productivity change in many industry sectors. Kent’s distinctive multi- and inter-disciplinary research environment also lends itself well to addressing the many productivity challenges faced by the UK, as does our international standing and the opportunities this gives us to establish collaborations that have the potential to deliver global momentum.
Running to 255 pages, the Strategy isn’t a light read and a lot of the detail has yet to be finalised. One area that is moving fast, however, are the Sector Deals. Four deals have been announced so far (in Life sciences; Construction; Artificial Intelligence; and, the Automotive sector.) Future deals are expected in the Creative Industries; Industrial digitalisation; and in Nuclear. These multi-institutional partnerships will bring together academics, industrialists, policy makers, practitioners and entrepreneurs to develop and implement novel products and services and enhance the efficiency of existing ones. The good news for Kent is that we not only have strengths in most of these areas but we also have a positive reputation for building unique and lasting partnerships. The Strategy comes at an ideal tine in our development. With the possibility of a medical school on the horizon and the “supercentres” nearing fruition, we should be able to reap many a reward. KIE, Research Services and many others will be working hard over the coming months to make sure that we do just that. Want to know more? Contact Simon Barnes, Industry Engagement Manager, KIE, s.f.barnes@kent.ac.uk 2
GETTING KUDOS ! If the Industrial Strategy is all about getting great ideas into practice, it makes sense that academics should use all of the tools available to them to make their ideas known. Kudos is one such tool. Free to individual researchers, it allows you to track the dissemination of your research outputs. This enables you to see which methods are most effective for reaching different audiences and then how those audiences engage with your work. In turn, this helps you to refine your dissemination tactics for the future. For example, you might share on a mailing list and receive a high number of clicks on a link and then downloads of an article, but sharing on Twitter produces no response. You then know you can reduce the time spent on Twitter (at least professionally). Kudos allows you to widen the audience of your publication, as well, guiding you through the process of adding a lay title, a plain language summary, a statement on why the research is important, and an author perspective on why the research is important. It is best used for one or two articles at a time, rather than spending time uploading everything you have published. You can then use the inbuilt sharing options to circulate the page via Twitter, LinkedIn, email, pdf, cover letter or other methods and you can measure views and changes in altmetric score, citations and downloads in relation to when it was shared.
You can also add links to other resources, such as presentations, videos, interviews, news coverage, figures, data-sets or related publications. For instance, if you have an article that comes out of a performance piece, this is where you can link to any information you have on the performance. Give it a go! To get started with Kudos, and for hints and tips see http://bit.ly/UsingKudos or contact the Office for Scholarly Communication ext 16645
Research Management Europe and Beyond : A Review As a longtime research manager and administrator (RMA), I was excited to hear about this new book in the field. It is perhaps the first work since Research Administration Management (Kulakowski and Chronister 2006) to attempt to cover the scope of who we RMAs are, what we do, and why. No small undertaking. Whilst Kulakowski & Chronister’s weighed in at 916 pages, this new work by Andersen et al is a more modest 360 pages but there is still plenty of information and debate to be had. This edited volume has been put together by individuals from different countries with four different native languages, and in some places this shows. Additionally some of the information provided is a little dated now,
perhaps inevitable due to the timescales involved in putting the book together. These quibbles are however easy to forgive, as it is generally accurate and also easy to read for the most part, although perhaps a little acronym heavy in some places. Everything you ever wanted to know …
To give some flavour to what you will find: Chapter 3, The Global Research Environment, is a particularly interesting discussion of national differences in the research environment, well balanced and covers gender issues well. Whereas the fourth chapter, Organizational Structures, is a little more disparate and wide ranging, perhaps trying to cover too much ground – it does nicely show that there is no “one size fits all” solution to the structure of research support. Chapter 6, Preaward— Project Preparation, has some lovely vignettes and a good overview. It could perhaps have benefited by some references to more in depth resources, for example the Research Funding Toolkit (Aldridge and Derrington 2012). The Postaward chapter focusses on EU funding, but the advice can easily be extrapolated to other funders. Other chapters cover areas such as: who are RMAs, dealing with academics, the (European) research environment, knowledge exchange, metrics, ethics, research infrastructure, diversity, and skills – there is something here for everyone working in research administration. Overall this is a far more Eurocentric offering than its American focussed predecessor, and this, as well as being ten years 3
more up to date, is perhaps it greatest strength. I would recommend it to those new to the profession, and indeed those wondering what an RMA is - and whether or not they should be one. The more senior amongst you will also find depth in a number of areas that you might be less familiar with. Should I buy it ?
That of course depends on your needs. Some of the funder and policy specific information will become dated, but the more generic parts such as the skills needed to be an RMA should stand the test of time. It is not exactly a page turner, and the style changes across the 15 chapters, but nonetheless, it is a useful resource, and in places, an extremely useful one. Something to dip into in those idle moments at your desk, should you have any, which according to my reading of Research Management - Europe and Beyond, seems unlikely! Simon Kerridge Want to know more?
The book can be ordered via h t t p : / / b i t . l y / Resear chMa na gementEur opeandBeyond
THE “MOCK REF” With the next REF exercise only three years away and with formal guidelines from HEFCE still being developed, the University-wide REF Pilot exercise took place over the summer and through Autumn term 2017 amid many uncertainties. The purpose of the exercise was:-
To document individual research outputs from all eligible staff (from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2017); To ensure that required output types are Open Access compliant according to current HEFCE policy; To monitor the development of Impact Case Studies; To review and verify accumulated data regarding the research environment; and, To identify areas of concern for UOAs which might require additional work/support in the lead up to the submission.
At it’s close on the 30th of November, the submission included over 1593 research outputs from 795 research staff members covering the period 1 January 2014 to 31st December 2017. These outputs had been selected by the REF UOA Working Groups from over 5,000 which had been uploaded to the Kent repository KAR. 120 first draft impact case studies were also submitted via the University’s impact tracker from Vertigo Ventures. The data has now been compiled and reviewed by the DVC Research and Innovation, Philippe De Wilde and feedback will gradually be disseminated to Schools via the Associate Deans
for Research, Directors of Research and the REF Coordinators. We are very pleased with the outcomes of the exercise which have allowed us to collate vital information needed to build our final submission. We do not envisage further exercises of this scale as we can now use further reviews as updates to the information we already hold. In the meantime, HEFCE has published some further guidelines for REF 2021 which can be found at www.ref.ac.uk. The full guidelines for submissions are expected to be made available this summer with the final guidelines and panel criteria to be issued in January 2019.
Breaking News... “Light touch” peer support groups are to be established for all REF-eligible staff. Groups should be between 5 – 15 members in size and should include academics working in the same field. The group members should determine how they support each other, how often they meet and who they wish to work with – both internally and externally. While there will be no formal reporting requirements, the DVC Research as well as members of Research Services and KIE will try to meet each group once a year, to discuss any research and innovation-related problems and to share good practice. The first group meetings should be held before the Summer break. 4
Changes in Research Services The Research Development Team has undergone a number of changes in the last few months. Lynne Bennett retired at the end of December, having worked at the University for 10 years. She will be missed by everyone. Her replacement, Michelle Secker, joins us from Canterbury Christ Church University on the 1st March. In the interim, any grant application queries in the Humanities can be directed to the Social Sciences Funding Officer, Aurelija Povilaike. Carolyn Barker and Phil Ward have both taken on secondments into new roles. Phil is trying on the hipster lifestyle for size while commuting to Shoreditch to write for Research Professional 4 days a week; and Carolyn is flexing her Chemistry muscles in a fulltime position within the Centre for Higher and Degree Apprenticeships. In a surprising twist, Brian Lingley has made a very welcome return to the team and is covering Carolyn’s previous international research funding portfolio (GCRF, Newton, Europe). Want to know more? For the REF please contact the Research Excellence Team at ref2021@kent.ac.uk If you’re not sure who to talk to in Research Services contact Sue Prout, S.Prout@kent.ac.uk ext 7054
An Overview of Research Funding, Aug-Dec 2017 Largest Individual Awards (titles of projects listed overleaf) Humanities: Dr Tamara Rathcke (SECL) £203,349 from the Leverhulme Trust
Last term was a bumper one for both the number and value of awards secured by Kent Academics. In a highly productive term, Kent teams brought in just shy of £10m of new research funding through 70 successful grant applications. In comparison, in the same quarter of 2016, total grant income was £7.7m
for the same number of applications. This reflects an overall upwards trend in successful grant applications, both University-wide and within the Faculties. Overall grant income is up by 67% on 2013 levels, with the Social Sciences making the largest overall increase of 313%.
Q3 Overall Award Value by Faculty, 2013—2017
Sciences: Prof Colin Robinson (Biosciences) £2,278,333 from RCUK
Percentage of Overall Award Value by Funder
Social Sciences: Prof Elena KorostelevaPolglase (PolIR) £2,363,738 from ESRC
Global Success Stories Two major awards in the Sciences and Social Sciences gave a major boost to Kent’s position last quarter. International collaborative bids led by Professors Colin Robinson and
Elena Korosteleva-Polglase to the Global Challenges Research Fund represent Kent’s first major successes in this important new funding scheme. Colin’s research into establishing animal vaccine production in SE Asia involves partners at UCL, Imperial, the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the National Center for Genetic Engineering in Thailand and 5
Bangkok University; while Elena’s capacity-building project involves the Universities of Cambridge, Belarus State, Azerbaijan and Uzbekhastan; and The Shahidi Cultural Foundation. Building successful collaborations is no easy task, requiring time, patience and cultural understanding. We congratulate Colin and Elena on their successes.
FULL LIST OF AWARDS: 1 Aug — 31 December 2017* Faculty of Humanities Kent School of Architecture Schoenefeldt
Palace of Westminster Conservation Houses of Parliament Management Plan School of Arts
£15,500
Maes
Portraits and Philosophy
British Society of Aesthetics
£1,430
Misek
Cinema Unframed
AHRC
£55,510
Smith
Laurance S Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow
Princeton University
£44,525
Norman
School of English The Cartographic Imagination : Art, Terra Foundation for American Literature and Mapping in the US, 1945—1990 Art
£7,028
School of European Culture and Languages Leverhulme Trust
Lazaro-Reboll
Visiting Professorship Leverhulme Trust
Lynch
British child migration schemes to Australia, 19471970: historical perspectives and public memory AHRC today
£201,710
Does Language Have Groove? Sensorimotor Leverhulme Trust Synchronisation for the Study of Linguistic Rhythm
£203,349
Rathcke
£21,139
School of History Anderson
Mattering: Assessment, Performance and Need
Wellcome Trust
£4,905
Connelly
Gateways Sep 16 E Hanna costs
AHRC
£33,968
Jones
'Lungs for the City': Health, Sustainability and ResiliWellcome Trust ence in the Globalised Urban Park (1800-2015)
Robinson Toseland
Faculty of Sciences Centre for Molecular Processing GCRF establishment of biopharmaceutical and animal vaccine production capacity in Thailand and RCUK neighbouring South East Actin regulation of nuclei mechanics in DNA repair Royal Society
£29,918
£2,278,333 £10,000
Medway School of Pharmacy Vasilopoulou
Fenton Gourlay Hsu Mulligan
Thyroid hormone action in kidney disease
Society for Endocrinology
School of Biosciences UCL Cancer Institute Research Head and Neck Cancer Research Trust The detection and management of microbial growth Kent Cancer Trust in patients following tracheostomy Synthetic protein membrane domains: a novel quantitative approach to study dynamics of membrane Royal Society molecular switches that direct cellular membrane trafficking In vitro characterisation of the DedA family: an Royal Society integral membrane protein family 6
£10,000
£19,380 £35,876 £14,971 £15,000
Tsaousis Tsaousis Tullet Warren Wass Xue
Batty Grigore
School of Biosciences (continued) Support grant for the 22nd Meeting of the Interna- Society for General tional Society of Evolutionary Protistology Microbiology Development of CRISPR-Cas9 for genome engi- Gordon and Betty Moore neering in Naegleria gruberi Foundation Deciphering the role of skn-1b in C. elegans to BBSRC promote a long and healthy life METALLOCHAPERONES: The partitioning of BBSRC metals to delivery pathways Inferring protein function using novel features and Academy of Medical Sciences advanced machine learning A central role for dityrosine cross-linking in AlzAlzheimer's Society heimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases School of Computing Compositional, dependency-aware C++ concurEPSRC rency Fast Runtime Verification via Machine Learning EPSRC
£1,580 £254,711 £444,945 £20.638 £99,000 £3,000
£98,786 £100,918
Grigore
Low Overhead Runtime Verification for ConcurRoyal Society rent Programs
£10,800
McLoughlin
Audio Intelligence for mobile devices
£54,411
Huawei
School of Engineering and Digital Arts Gomes
Visiting Professor in Communication Networks
Royal Academy of Engineering
Experimental Investigation into Oxy-Combustion Lu behaviours of biomass particles through digital EPSRC imagi Water leakage detection and wastage monitoring Yan Medway NHS Foundation Trust through advanced sensing and data modelling Multi-phase Flow Metering through Statistical Data KROHNE Yan Fusion School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science LMS South East Mathematical Physics seminars Dunning London Mathematical Society 2017/18 Anglo-Franco-German Network in Representation Launois EPSRC Theory and its applications Soares Lourei- Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions, OperLondon Mathematical Society ro ator Theory and Applications Multiparameter Bifurcation Theory - from theory Waterstraat Royal Society to applications School of Physical Sciences Scattering in Confined and Sheared Geometries Barker Swedish Research Council Barker Gee
Gee Moeller
New Industrial Systems: Optimising Me Manufacturing Systems Using volatile lanthanide complexes to visualise latent fingerprints Evaluating new chemical treatments for visualising latent fingerprints using portable forensic light sources Fluctuation driven orders near quantum critical points
EPSRC
£28,800 £4,000 £39,374 £82,200
£1,600 £158,894
£1,200 £2,580
£102,939 £412,962
Royal Society of Chemistry
£3,936
Royal Society
£14,732
Royal Society
£108,742
*The list given is for all awards of £1,000 or more. They do not include extensions or supplements 7
Continued over
School of Physical Sciences (continued) Hiscock
The synthesis and charaterisation of styrene-based reactive super polymeric absorbents for the degradation of organophosphorous derivatives.
Ramos Perez
Transport characterization of electronic order in novel materials with strongly correlated electrons and reduced Royal Society dimensions
Shepherd
Phototropic Smart Materials for Actuation and Responsive Technologies (PhotoSMART)
EPSRC
£100, 834
Saines
Optimising Ferroelectric Hybrid Frameworks through Tuning Electronegativity
EPSRC
£101,143
DEFRA
£229,637
£12,948
Faculty of Social Sciences Kent Business School Acquaye
Managing in the Age of the Sharing Economy: Exploring the antecedents and performance consequences
Khan
Training Workshop: A Multi-disciplinary Research Approach to Environmental Sustainability Modelling:
Society for the Advancement of Management Studies Society for the Advancement of Management Studies
£5,100 £4,079
Kent Law School Kang Oduntan
Bocaege Fish Humle Mezzenzana Smith
European Research Council (ERC) Tracking noxious funds: strategies and techniques for MacArthur Foundawhistle blowing tion School of Anthropology and Conservation A micro-evolutionary perspective on tooth size at the origins of agriculture in the Levant: British Academy fel- British Academy lowship for Emmy Bocaege South Atlantic EnviSpatial distribution and value of local culture and recrearonmental Research tion in the Falkland Islands Institute Patterns and drivers of wild meat and resource utilization Arcus Foundation in the High Niger National Park, Guinea, West Africa PASSIM
Understanding children’s empathy: an ethnographic study European Commisamong the indigenous Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon sion Testing systematic approaches to planning ecological netDEFRA works in Natural England School of Politics and International Relations
Goodwin
The 'Brexit Referendum' and Identity Politics in Britain
ESRC
KorostelevaPolglase
GCRF Facilitating Excellence across Eastern Neighbourhood and Central Asia: research integration, impact gov- ESRC ernance and sustainable communities
Loizides
Citizen Preferences in the Design of Effective Peace Settlements
Scnhabel
An Instrument of Centralisation? Exploring the Politics of British Academy Conditional Grants in Federal States
US Institute for Peace
£123,843 £37,267
£242,263 £17,000 £23,648 £174,783 £48,485
£64,910 £2,363,738 £71,920 £89,016
School of Psychology Uskul
Offering and Receiving Apologies: A UK / Turkey Comparison
8
Royal Society
£99,000
School of Social Policy , Sociology and Social Research
Bradshaw
Early Positive Approaches to Support - Piloting Evaluation
Bradshaw
Evaluating the impact of communication passports for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Bradshaw
Evaluation of E-PAtS - Leeds
Cerebra National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Royal Mencap Society
MICA: Going beyond health related quality of life MRC towards a broader QALY measure for use across sectors National Institute of The Social Care Needs of Adults with Tourette's SynForrester-Jones Health Research drome: An Exploratory Study (NIHR) Religious urbanisation and infrastructural development in Garbin British Academy African mega-cities: politics of inclusion Academic Evaluation of Best Beginnings' Baby Buddy Kendall Best Beginnings Phone App National Institute of Exploring support for people with IDD to find loving McCarthy Health Research Relationships (NIHR) National Institute of Experiences of adults with learning disabilities receiving Padden Health Research life skills training (NIHR) Scaling up primary care: impact of organisation of general Department of Peckham practice on outcomes for patients and the NHS Health Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in EmVickerstaff ESRC ployment Forder
£2,000 £50,318 £2,900 £36,022 £18,991 £282,812 £2,872 £144,821 £49,925 £52,137 £38,918
Ever wanted to get these lists more regularly? Or adapt the parameters to see not only who’s won
BESPOKE awards but who’s applying? Or just limit them to your school? These data are all available in real
STATS
time on the Research Services website. https://research.kent.ac.uk/researchservices/applicationaward-statistics— take a look !
WELCOME TO KENT! 35 academics joined Kent between August and December 2017. Join with us in welcoming them to the University and take a moment to find out about their varied research interests. Dr Panagiotis Besbeas (SMAS) : statistical ecology. Dr Flora Renz (KLS) : gender, sexuality and law and the legal regulation of identities. Dr Damian Milton (Tizard Centre) : increasing the meaningful participation of autistic people and people with learning disabilities in the research process. Dr Yu-Lun Liu (KBS) : individual differences, consumer behaviour, online recruitment and advertising.
Dr Aniello Palma (SPS) : the design of smart and responsive materials prepared via supramolecular approaches and inspired by biological polymers. Dr Matthew Whittle (English) : postcolonial studies, with a specific interest in Caribbean literature, migration and diaspora, and the “end of Empire”; post-war and contemporary British literature; animal studies and the relationship between trophy hunting,
taxonomy and postcoloniality. Dr Stefa n Marr (Computing) : programming language implementation techniques and concurrent and parallel programming. Dr Ozgur Kafali (Computing) : sociotechnical and human factors in cybersecurity and data privacy, intelligent agents, computational logic. Dr Suzanna Ivanic (History) : religion, travel, Central Europe, and material and Continued over
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visual culture. Dr Sara-Louise Cooper (SECL) : Caribbean literature in French, Russian émigré writing, conceptions of ‘world literature’ and literary expressions of memory and history. Dr Tobias Heinrich (SECL) : German literature of the eighteenth century, historical and contemporary genres of Life Writing, literary theory and Austrian literature and film. Dr Christopher Strevens (SECL) : Republican Roman history and Greek intellectual culture in the Imperial period. Dr Erik Larsen (PolIR) : the nature of public opinion and in particular its relation to and relevance for public policies. Dr Rebecca Ogden (SECL) : tourism and place branding; popular and digital culture in contemporary Latin America. Dr Lauren Ware (SECL) : the role of emotions in political and legal deci sionmaking, in the evaluation of risk and security, and in Plato’s political philosophy . Dr Ilhan Guner (Economics) : Macroeconomics, economic growth and labour economics. Dr Maria Kalli (SMAS) : Econometrics, mathematical finance, Bayesian non-parametric methods, Bayesian regression and variable selection, MCMC methodology, and financial time series modelling. Dr James Bentham (SMAS) : Bayesian hierarchical models and MCMC methods; Analysis of large datasets; statistical genetics; and analysis of textbased data. Dr Alexandra Couto (SECL) : the role of responsibility in luck egalitarianism, the
conditions for the justifiability of interpersonal forgiveness and issues relating to the Beneficiary Pays Principle. Dr Rui Zhu (SMAS) : Statistical machine learning, dimension reduction, spectral data analysis, hyperspectral image analysis, and image quality assessment. Dr Kaitlyn Regehr (Arts) : exploring the intersections between gender, performance and politics in female driven communities. Dr Joseph Bull (SAC) : natural resource management within dynamic socio-ecological systems, particularly in relation to economic development. Dr Umair Choksy (KBS) : theoretical and practical issues around social-spatial practices, power relations and upgrading in global production networks, resilience and capability development in conflict zones and adverse institutional contexts. Dr Mehdi Hamidisahneh (Economics) : Time series analysis, Macroeconometrics, Financial econometrics; Dr Daniel Bearup (SMAS) : Mathematical ecology (multiscale problems in control and conservation of populations; ecological networks; ecosystem engineering; population dispersal and movement models) and Mathematical Biology (modelling bacterial metabolism and antibiotic resistance). Dr Shoaib Jameel (Computing) : probabilistic topic models, Bayesian nonparametric statistics, vector space embeddings, natural language processing, optimization, and information retrieval. Professor Theodosios Dimtrakos (Computing). Professor Desmond Doran (KBS) : Operations improvement, Supply chain management (including sustainability), Interorganisational relationships, 10
Dynamic capabilities. Professor Shujun Li (Computing) : cyber security, multimedia computing, human factors , applications of artificial intelligence in cyber security and multimedia computing and applications of nonlinear science (chaos/fractals) in computer science and electronic engineering. Professor Jeremy Howells (KBS) : innovation intermediaries, open innovation and knowledge exchange. Dr Marisa Silvestri (SSPSSR) : the gendered nature of organisational identities within criminal justice. Dr Virginia S p i e g l e r (KBS) : modelling, designing and simulating inventory- and order-based control systems that overcome nonlinear dynamics and on building resilient supply chains. Dr Omar AlTabbaa (KBS) : the dynamics of inter-organisational relationships (IOR) and their impact on value creation and capture; and, the application of strategy-as-practice (SAP) perspective in untraditional settings. Dr Ben Laker (KBS) : using operations management practices to create and sustain high-performing organisations. Dr Portia Owusu (SECL) : contemporary American and West African literature.
The Figures behind the Figures Our regular look at the work of those who have won grants at Kent
Professor Gordon Lynch Gordon didn't originally set out to be an academic, and his early work experience was more in the fields of social work and counselling. Having decided to embark on a PhD exploring moral assumptions in counselling and psychotherapy, he became increasingly fascinated by the way that moral meanings shape the lives of individuals and groups. This has led him from his initial training in practical theology to look at subjects ranging from the ways that media and popular culture serve as sources of meaning, the rise of a ‘new spirituality’ beyond organised religion, and the uses of moral meaning in social and political communication. Exploring sacred values His most recent AHRC Leadership Fellowship award allows him to continue research into the UK child migration schemes that operated from the late 1860s until 1970. He explains, “Over the past few years, I’ve become interested in what societies see as sacred or profane and how in today’s society, the care of children has become a kind of sacred value. Images of child cruel-
ty or neglect can create a deeply felt sense of the profane or evil. I was curious about how children had come to be thought of in those kind of terms, as well as the moral meanings that are used to justify social interventions into children’s lives. In particular, I’ve become interested in how we deal with parts of our history that are about welfare interventions previously thought to provide moral and civic redemption for children but are now seen as highly damaging. The child migration schemes are an example of this. Operated by leading charities and churches and funded by the Government, they were claimed to be doing a morally productive thing but the endresult was often incredibly harmful for the children. How could this have happened ?” Unpleasant Trade Offs “It’s not simply that our thinking has changed today. When the migration schemes to Australia recommenced in the post -war years, they increasingly ran against what many secular child-care professionals believed to be in children’s best interests. But at a government level there was a balance to be struck between ensuring the best interests of these children whilst also supporting the Australian Government in its plans for population growth through immigration. Strategically, Australia was also a very im11
portant partner to the UK in terms of trade, international diplomacy and in our use of the mainland of Australia for nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. Over time, the UK Government became increasingly aware that British child migrants were not receiving appropriate care, and that their inspection of the institutions to which they were being sent wasn’t adequate, but it didn’t act, partly because of the desire to maintain good relations with Australia. Ultimately, the project is about the political and organisational dynamics underpinning a ‘moral’ welfare intervention that resulted in a major policy failure”.
Learning from the past This is what makes Gordon’s work so relevant today. For much of 2017, he was an expert witness for the I n d e pendent Inquiry i n t o Child Sex Abuse (IICSA). He carried out research t h a t showed both the policy context that these child migration schemes operated within and that revealed what the different organisations knew about the safeguards that should have been in place—but weren’t. That report is due out this spring and he hopes that it will lead to further
redress for some of the estimated 1,000 former British child migrants still alive today. Raising public awareness of this history will also be tackled through the continuation of Gordon’s innovative collaboration with folk music producer John Leonard, and other leading British folk musicians, with a planned nation-wide tour of their original musical compositions, The Ballads of Child Migration.
Develop your applications on the basis of the established expertise that you have; and supplement that with other people when necessary. Make sure that the project plan is as detailed as it possibly can be. Be realistic about what’s needed to get a grant through – it is achievable but it does need work and practice; and, Get help ! “Writing grant applications requires a different style of writing to what we normally do. The kind of training that Phil Ward and his team have developed is really excellent and does make a difference”.
What’s next ? “Always have a Plan B…” Developing novel collaborations has not always been easy but Gordon is a firm believer in giving things a go and not being disheartened if people say no! “You need a certain kind of resilience. Sometimes things come off and sometimes they don’t. It’s like with grant applications. One of the things I have learnt to do is always to think about how I can use the groundwork in that application towards another application if I don’t get this one. So with this Fellowship application I thought about how it could be split into possibly 3 separate applications if the Fellowship bid wasn’t successful. Always having a plan B and C in mind makes it a bit easier if you don’t get your first choice!”. Gordon’s other top tips for grant success:
Not content to rest on his laurels, Gordon has recently been appointed as a sub-panel Chair for the next REF. Why take on this extra responsibility? “I applied partly because I thought it was important for my discipline to have someone who was involved as a sub-panel member in the REF2014 exercise. There were some bits of the REF process that I thought worked really well and I wanted to try and
support those, but there were also other parts where I could see that problems arose and knowing what those were would make it easier for our discipline to negotiate processes this time around. We are just working now to establish the initial membership of the sub-panels and are also starting to get involved in consultations on how some aspects of the REF might work. The REF does generate a lot of anxiety and also sometimes resentment from subject areas that feel under-represented on panels and the Chair can become the lightning rod for all of that. There are still major challenges that REF sub-panels face in terms of the diversity of their composition, which reflect wider problems in our sector around gender and ethnicity, some of which arguably stretch right back into our undergraduate programmes. Having been through the process before though does give you a kind of road map for the issues that you’ll need to address this time and also an idea of when the real work pressures are going to start!” The Ballads of Child Migration can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/BalladsofChildMigr ation
Look alike corner Fresh from his recent close shave by a bear from Darkest Peru, Sir Tom Conti has apparently been announced as the new Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute. Marmalade sandwiches all round then ???
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Tom Conti
Adrian Smith